The objectives of the project are to develop and apply linguistic and semiotic models to diagnose language and communication patterns of schizophrenics and their families; to discriminate language differences in subgroups of schizophrenics; and to compare the language characteristics of schizophrenic young adults and their parents. The data consists of verbatim transcripts of schizophrenic individuals and their families during Rorschach, TAT, and other verbal procedures (114 families, 560 subjects). An empirical scoring system developed by the principal investigator (MS Typology, describing 41 deviance codes) is used to code the linguistic output. Two lines of research are being pursued: 1) Our theoretical work aims at the formulation of a linguistic/semiotic model to cluster features represented by the codes of the MS Typology into constructs having common denominators. 2) Coded data is translated into computer readable form and subjected to statistical analyses. The structure of the MS Typology is being studied by factor analysis and discriminant analyses. Proposed discrete structural models of communication deviances are fit to the sample data to derive an algorithm for clustering the typology items. Statistical analysis is being used to determine a parsimonious coding scheme to revise the MS Typology. The utility of our theoretical linguistic and statistical models is to be tested on subgroups of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics as well as on two new samples.